Originally posted by: Harlock415
But damn it Lucas, this took me a couple of hours to do onmy home computer that's 4 years old. He could have done the same thing, probably with bette results.

I theorized about this during the summer. The only reason I can think of for why LFL didn't just make the 4:3 into 16:9 is that, while it would have no doubt looked better on widescreen displays than the non-anamorphic transfers that they gave us, it might not look as good on 4:3 displays. If they had cropped a 480 picture and then made a new 480 picture out of that, people watching it on 4:3 displays would be seeing it after the dvd player performed the 4:3 downscaling (or downconversion, whatever it's called). This might not have looked as good as the 480 letterbox non-anamorphic transfer that he gave us, but of course that screwed over anyone trying to watch it on a 16:9 display.

Lucas/LFL is really behind the times. First he waits until the best possible moment to release the trilogy on dvd, several years after the format had clearly caught on, then waits two more years to release the O-OT in a format that's been obsolete for nearly a decade.